Almost paradise

August 12, 2006
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I’ve had a “honeymoon” weekend with my wife and that is close to paradise to me. On Friday afternoon we left the noisy and stressful city for a 4 hours trip to our summerhouse in Sweden, this time without the children. We chatted about all and nothing as well as sometimes sitting quiet, enjoying our company is food for the soul. A whole weekend ahead, with all the options and anticipation – what more can a married couple ask for.

It’s still summer in the Nordic countries with a late sunset around 9pm, but you see signs along the road that fall is on its way. It’s now time for the harvest and I could not resist capturing this field full of rolls of hay. As normal, all the pics in this post are taken with my Nokia mobile phone, please click on them to enlarge.

It is fascinating how the stress literally runs off your back when entering Mariestad and our apartment. There are different, but very important rituals to follow and my first is to open a cold beer. This one is Danish, a Carlsberg, and their slogan is: “When does a Carlsberg taste best?…. and the answer is of course “every time”:-)

Soon it’s time to make dinner and we always make something special when we arrive. As we both love sea food, on Friday it was shrimp and this is the way we serve it: On a slice of bread, drizzled with lemon, some mayonnaise and then fresh boiled shrimps.

The bowl to the left is to rinse your fingers after pealing. White wine is a must and this time we had an Italian Soave from the Valpolicella region: Masi 2003, which tasted excellent (please visit my blog friend Italian’s Insight to Travel Italy for more wine and culture information!) . It’s still too bright for candle lights, but it was very romantic anyway;-).

After cleaning off the table, it’s time for coffee avec on the balcony to enjoy our precious company and the lovely long lasting sunset. To show you the serving, I arranged the whole dessert on our dinner table. Coffee is made in a press can we got from my daughter for Christmas and the dessert was a wienerbrød, a butter pastry filled with egg crème and chocolate we had Hennessy cognac to top off the evening. Sitting there in the quietness, you can’t blame me for calling this precisely quality time. This is how we charge our batteries for the daily routines and challenges.

We had other memorable moments this evening too of course, but I take it you understand we consider them private;-). Not too early to bed, we had our golf round early the day after anyway – see earlier posts for details on our golf obsession. This one was special though, since my wife finally got her white handicap card and her swing is excellent too!

Then we had a trip through the charming town of Mariestad, visiting the sports store to talk to our golf expert, buying an ice cream to eat on a bench in the park and enjoying the lovely summer atmosphere. It was so beautiful that I would love to share the view and the flowers with you.

I don’t consider this blog, my Terella, a food blog, but it’s an important part of my daily life so I’ve decided to share some with you this time because it shows some of our food tradition too. Today we had a traditional summer meal of herring and potatoes; along with it we have onion, eggs, beets, cauliflower, and crème fraises. To Old Norwegian traditional foods like herring of course we had aquavit from Linie distillery and beer. Bon appetite!

Tomorrow it’s a new round on the golf course before heading for home in Norway and another ordinary work week. But still there is more time left on our honeymoon trip and we are enjoying every minute of it. These precious time in our paradise definitely qualifies for quality time, don’t you think?

Culture, Habits, Nature, Summer